Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

Chapter 288: New Glasses for Daisy

I’ll be honest with myself, there was something really good and exciting about having sex outdoors definitely."Someone’s coming," Cindy said.

Daisy came through it at something approaching a run, pulling the door shut behind her with both hands, pressing her back against it and breathing hard. Her eyes found us immediately and she let out a long, shaky exhale that had a small amount of tearfulness somewhere in it.

"It’s fine," Cindy said, moving toward her with a smile. "You made it."

I was already moving. I pulled the door open, stepped out, handled the Infected with a clean swing of my axe and kicked the body clear of the threshold before stepping back inside and pulling the door shut again.

"Thank you," Daisy said, smiling.

"Finishing up?" Daisy asked, tilting her head.

"Checking the space," I said, the recovery arriving approximately one beat later than ideal. "For infected. Structurally. Nothing in here, it’s clean and safe."

"Any time," I said.

The wall Shawn had described was exactly as he’d said, a long counter lined with labeled bags and boxes, each tagged with a printed collection slip, undisturbed and complete. Prescriptions fulfilled by the lab and returned, waiting patiently for the patients who had stopped coming. Weeks of someone’s careful optical work, sitting in the quiet dark of an abandoned building.

"The prescription details are on the slips," I said, falling into step beside her. "Full data... lens strength, axis, correction type, everything. Go through them carefully and find the closest match to what you actually need. Don’t approximate."

She set it down. Picked up the next one.

"This one."

"Close enough?" I asked.

"Very close," she said. "I think... yes. Yes, these would work."

Daisy set her broken pair down on the counter. She opened the new case. Lifted them out. Put them on.

Once. A slow, adjusting blink.

Then she went very still for a moment blinking again.

Daisy turned and looked at me. Both lenses intact, clear-eyed, focused, nothing between her and the world for the first time in a long time.

"Good," I said. "Now go through the rest and take a couple of backup pairs as well. Different frames, same prescription range. Glasses break, you know that better than anyone and we’re not going to find a setup like this again easily."

Cindy and I stepped back to give her room, drifting toward the display cases along the far wall, the retail section, untouched frames still arranged in neat rows behind the glass, price tags still attached.

I looked over just in time to see her drive the pommel of her knife into the glass case in a single clean strike. The panel caved inward with a muted crack, pieces falling cleanly.

She pulled out a pair of oversized sunglasses, the kind with large rounded lenses and thin gold frames, the type that would have cost more than a reasonable person would spend on something that sat on their face. She held them up, considered them briefly, and put them on.

"How is it?" She asked.

"Do they have any correction in them?" I asked, smiling despite myself.

"They look good," I said, honestly.

"Try these," she said, holding them out.

"Well?" she asked.

She looked at me for a moment with her head tilted slightly, and something in her expression went briefly, genuinely soft.

"Why?"

I stood there for a moment before laughing.

But I held onto them.

"Got what you needed?" I asked.

"Good," I said.

"Yes," Daisy agreed laughing.

"What is taking them so long?" Cindy asked as we stepped back onto the street, directing the question at no one in particular.

She was not exaggerating.

Shawn himself was still moving through the shelves.

"I am taking advantage of the situation," Shawn said, without looking up from the shelf he was reading. "Opportunity doesn’t announce itself twice. You are fast and capable and they rarely let me out, and when they do I’m surrounded by people who flinch at shadows." He pulled something from the shelf, read the label, placed it carefully into a third bag he was working on. "I intend to leave here having never needed to come back."

I leaned slightly toward Cindy. "Check in here while we’re at it," I said quietly. "You know what for."

"Cindy?" Daisy moved to follow her.

She turned, looking at me with mild surprise.

Daisy looked at me.

Then back at me, with those newly clear eyes that, I was beginning to realize, missed considerably less than the cracked ones had.

"Great," I said.

Daisy pushed them up slightly with one finger and smiled. "Yes."

Daisy blinked. "Oh."

"I know," Daisy whispered back, the blush already arriving.

"That should cover everything," he said.

Shawn looked at the two, now three enormous bags sitting on the floor.

"You’ll help," he said.

"He can—" Shawn started, glancing at me.

Shawn grumbled. He bent down, gathered the bags, redistributed the weight between both hands, and straightened up.

Cindy came back through the interior door at almost exactly that moment. She fell in beside me and I glanced down at her bag.

"Absolutely," she said, smiling wide and bright.

What a world we were living in, half the city overrun, armed criminals holding prisoners across the water, alien entities conducting their ancient war through our streets, and our main personal achievement of the afternoon was locating birth control pills in an abandoned pharmacy.

"I’m hungry and I’d like to go back before it gets dark," Maribel said, already turning toward the street. "Everyone moving?"

We were about half a block along when I stopped.

The Dullahan Senses reacted.

A second later, Cindy stopped too.

She nodded looking at me nervously.